NMSU scholar: No Maya 2012 prophecy of world ending Dec. 21

Dr. Weldon Lamb wants you to know the other side of the end of the world story.

For the past 40 years and longer, the clock has been ticking toward the supposed end of the world Dec. 21 -- Friday -- a prediction often attributed to the Maya and their calendar.

Lamb, an anthropology scholar at New Mexico State University, disputes the notion in popular culture that the ancient Maya in southern Mexico and Central America or their calendar predicted the end of the world.

"There's no Maya prophecy that suggests that at any period the world is going to end," Lamb said.

Lamb is an epigrapher, a scholar who has learned to read ancient Maya inscriptions such as those carved on stone and painted on pottery. He will explain the meaning of the carved stone Mayan text during a lecture Friday at the El Paso Museum of Archaeology.

The Maya didn't say what would happen next after a 5,125-year cycle known as the Long Count ends on Dec. 21.

Even as scientists and scholars such as Lamb try to debunk doomsday rumors, thousands from China to California to Mexico are preparing for what they think is going to be a fateful day, according to The Associated Press.

NASA, the U.S. space agency, and the Vatican have chimed into the international debate, suggesting there will be no monumental change and that doomsday scenarios are not even worth discussing.

Occult writers, bloggers and others have jumped aboard the end of the world hype.

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New Age visionaries foresee a new age of enlightenment.

The doomsday frenzy, fed by Hollywood movies, foreboding television documentaries, books and alarmist websites, suggests for example that an alien spaceship hidden in the French Pyrenees will be the only escape from mass destruction.

In China, two men are building arks because they expect world-ending floods.

Others believe a hidden rogue planet called Nibiru will emerge from behind the sun and smash into the Earth.

Another doomsday theory suggests a super black hole at the center of the universe will suck in our planet and smash it to pieces.

NASA suggests on its website that Dec. 21 signals another winter solstice but not the end of the world.

"The world will not end in 2012. Our planet has been getting along just fine for more than 4 billion years, and credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012," the space agency said.

Lamb has studied Mayan astronomy, calendrics and hieroglyphic writing for years. He teaches anthropology, religion and linguistics at New Mexico State University.

"Just about any book or show that talks about 2012 talks about the Maya calendar and then they show the so-called Aztec calendar," Lamb said. "So basically it's sensationalism and ignorance, an opportunity to make money. It's just one of those amusing things that the 'fast-to-make-a-buck people' do."

Lamb suggests that while the Mayans were excellent mathematicians and astronomers, they sometimes were not good stewards of their environment.

Marilyn Guida, education curator at the El Paso Museum of Archaeology, is optimistic that Lamb's lecture will help the public understand the ancient Maya.

"It's incredibly profound how far back in time the Maya managed to calculate time," Guida said. "This is a way into understanding ancient people and help us think of them as real and intelligent people."

Geoffrey Braswell, an associate professor of anthropology and leading Maya scholar at the University of California, San Diego, suggested all the hype surrounding Dec. 21 tells us more about ourselves than the ancient Maya.

"The belief that the world will end soon is a very strong belief in Western cultures," Braswell said. "The Maya, we don't really know if they believed the world would ever end."

More than 11,000 visitors checked out the exhibition "Maya 2012: Prophecy becomes History" at the Houston Museum of Natural Science in the first month since it opened Oct. 26. The exhibit on the Maya and their culture depicts six Maya calendars including the one that's ending on Dec. 21.

"This is about the real Maya as opposed to the (doomsday) scenarios that have nothing to do with the Maya," said Dirk Van Tuerenhout, the museum's curator of anthropology.

Van Tuerenhout said an archaeologist named Michael Coe is often credited with planting the Maya doomsday notion in a book first published in 1966 and in subsequent editions.

"The Maya themselves never claimed it was the end of the world way back when," Van Tuerenhout said. "And if you ask a Maya shaman today, they don't believe in it either."

Jose Manrique Esquivel, a descendent of the Maya, said his community in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula sees the date as a celebration of their survival despite centuries of genocide and oppression. He blamed profiteers looking to scam the gullible for stoking doomsday fears.

"For us, this Dec. 21 is the end of a great era and also the beginning of a new era. We renew our beliefs. We renew a host of things that surround us," Esquivel said.

In Las Cruces, Lamb tells visitors it's a pretty safe bet that there will be no big end of the world on Friday, no catastrophic collision with anything in the sky, no Armageddon, no apocalyptic destruction of Earth like in the movies, not even a killer volcano, earthquake or tsunami.

"We simply have no indication from Maya anywhere anytime that worlds end at period endings," Lamb said.

Ramón Rentería may be reached at rrenteria@elpasotimes.com; 546-6146. Follow him on Twitter @RamonRrenteria

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Make plans

Dr. Weldon Lamb, a New Mexico State University scholar who learned to read ancient Mayan inscriptions, will lecture about the "end of the world" hype in popular culture and its association with the Mayan calendar at 2 p.m. Friday at the El Paso Museum of Archaeology, 4301 Transmountain. Limited seating available on a first-come, first-served basis. Free.